That’s what pundits always ask about the Republicans botched attempt at mounting a serious get out the vote campaign. There’s plenty of blame to go around: the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) lack of sharing voter registration data, the botched project Orca mobile campaign and the lack of a comprehensive digital program to cite just a few.

Post-election, President Obama’s staffers credited their victory to the most advanced ground game ever seen in politics. That ground game successfully integrated and deployed intelligent voter registration data to volunteers and political marketers for the sole purpose of getting swing state voters to the polls.

Their digital team was clever, hard-working and integrated. But shortly after the election, were disbanded.

At the same time, the RNC quietly assembled a large team of staffers to understand why they lost. The team compiled a mountain of evidence and later that year created a 100-page post-mortem outlining why Mitt Romney lost the election and more importantly - what the RNC needed to fix for the next one.

What we didn’t know until now, is whether they actually took their own advice.

The RNC is the glue that ostensibly holds the entire Republican Party together. They have teams of people who analyze political campaigns, research voter issues, raise funds and develop election strategy. Their primary function is to help Republican candidates get elected.

It's not a stretch to say the Republican Party revolves around the compass point of the RNC. So given the loss in 2012, the RNC sought to point true north again.

So with that in mind, I sat down with the RNC team to understand what’s changed since 2012. What they demonstrated is game-changing and is being rolled out today:

The Republican Data Center And Political Data As A Service

The first big change is that the RNC has created both a software platform (called the Data Center) and a "data as a service" offering to any Republican candidates running for office nationwide. Azarius Reda, Chief Technology Officer for the RNC, tells me that they have effectively become the Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Republican political data.

Effectively, they’ve developed a data platform that allows candidates to read and write data to and from the platform. That means, because they allow access through APIs (routines, protocols and tools to access the data) the Data Center will continuously serve up the latest information for GOP candidates without RNC participation.

As of today, candidates can access 300+ terabytes of data and over 20 years of voter contact data free of charge. Moreover, the user interface appeared easy to use, allowing quick, LinkedIn-like, advanced navigation drill downs into meta-data for any territory in the United States. For example, if you want to find 10 people on a residential block that haven’t voted in the past 20 years, have strong views on conservative topics, and don’t like the Affordable Care Act, candidates can do that in seconds.

The RNC is also staffing thousands of people in all 50 states across the country to help candidates use the Data Center strategically. “We’ve broken target states into thousands of targeted turfs based on where persuadable voters are located. Each will have a paid staffer and a tiered structure of neighborhood leaders and volunteers beneath them,” Allison Moore, Press Secretary for the RNC shared with me.

The New Republican Digital Election Strategy

Fortunately for the Republicans, the 2014 midterms saw huge Republican gains and their new, enhanced data was able to accurately predict the final outcomes with Nate Silver like precision. According to the RNC, 2014’s election cycle was a sort of proving ground for an earlier version of the Data Center, but it was controlled primarily by RNC staffers.

Marketers will recognize a new feature in the RNC’s Data Center – a unique voter scoring initiative. Voter scoring is an evolution of statistical modeling that utilizes meta-data to predict a voter’s behavior. The idea of voter scoring evolved during the 2012 election when the RNC gathered over 80 million voter contacts. There was heavy analysis on when they contacted a voter (mail, door, phone), if they voted and whether they voted absentee or on Election Day. This data proved valuable in knowing how best to motivate and contact a voter. To date, they’ve invested nearly $200 million in voter profiling, and plan to spend another $20 million on the data this election cycle.

The RNC’s enhanced social strategy involves a lot of active listening (they use Sprinklr) to match up social data to voter data automatically. “We don’t just have the information they’re tweeting about, we can match them with their voting and purchasing habits in order to target them through email and social networks,” Jesse Kamzol, Chief Data Officer for the RNC told me.

Kamzol also explained how they are using social trend data to help candidates get ahead of issues to educate voters on their positions, “We can predict accurately about what trends will be important and which ones won’t. We have a few Senators on record that have said identifying these trends early, helped them win their Senate seats.”

One of those Senators, Cory Gardner of Colorado said, “The RNC’s investment and strategic advice in the form of data and innovative ground game techniques proved invaluable in our race. It was the best coordinated effort I’ve ever seen.”

A little surprised at their trend analysis capabilities and the Senator’s response, at one point I asked RNC Chief of Staff Katie Walsh to further expand on the Data Center’s predictive analytics capabilities, she explained, “we can tell a candidate if a voter is going to vote for them or not and give them the reasons. We can literally go voter by voter and tell the candidate whether the voter will turn out to vote or not. For example, we can now tell a candidate four weeks out from an election that they are 18,000 votes down, you are under-performing with young American Hispanic women, here’s where they live, and here is the communications strategy to reach them.”

Translation: Candidates can now test out different messages, political positions and strategy to see how it impacts a potential voter base – prior to actually going public with them.

What's amazing about the RNC’s new platform and election strategy is that they were able to create and utilize it so quickly after the 2012 election upset. It is a massive undertaking that proves how serious they are about helping their candidates get elected. The RNC could have decided to punt until 2016’s election year, but were determined to implement a new model that is user friendly and that can be utilized without their involvement.

We know now that the RNC was serious about follow through. What happened to the RNC in 2012 and what is likely still happening within their walls, is a phenomenon as old as politics itself. Given a choice between investing and politics as usual, they spent the money. It was a big call to make, and judging by 2014’s results, appears to be the right one.

I provide an insider's view of the modern business world based on my years of experience working as an executive and consultant within the Global 3000. I am the CEO for Fanatics Media, a Digital Marketing Agency, and the author of Socialized!